The books are piled up to form walls, rooms and seats, and partially submerged in the earth to become flooring.

Eight varieties of mushroom are cultivated on selected books, speeding their decay into the landscape.

Here's some more information from Folkerts:

100Landschaftsarchitektur Thilo Folkerts, Rodney LaTourelle, Berlin

Jardin de la Connaissance, Metis (CA), 2010

International Festival des Jardins de Metis (Quebec), Canada

By introducing the book as a material in the formation of spatial elements within the landscape, Jardin de la Connaissance offers an evocative cultural frame to examine transformational processes inherent in the nature of the forest. Walls, benches and floors made of used books structure a series of rooms at once framing and dissolving into their environment.

Invoking the mythic relation between knowledge and nature integral to the concept of ‘paradise’, we invite the emotional involvement of the visitor by exposing these fragile and supposedly timeless cultural artefacts to the processes of decomposition.

The decaying books are organized between structural coloured plates, while their deterioration is further stimulated and accentuated by varieties of mushrooms that will be cultivated on selected editions. The garden becomes a sensual reading room; a library; an information platform; an invitation to a provocative realm of knowledge.

Thilo Folkerts is a landscape architect, teacher, writer and gardener. He founded the office 100Landschaftsarchitektur in Berlin in 2007. He has realized temporary and permanent gardens all over Europe. Rodney LaTourelle is a Canadian artist, writer and designer, based in Berlin.

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His artistic approach is informed by his education in architecture and landscape architecture. His site-specific installations have been exhibited internationally. They have worked together on this project that revitalizes the notion of gardening as an art form.

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Comments

so many hours of work from so many people provide now a foundation but also walls to a new generation...

Ale

What a waste of books. These could have been far better used with many being sent to Africa.

Shmuck

...really? thats your critical comment? Send them to Africa? Clearly we're looking at something that isn't a waste of books! Infact, what we are seeing is the re-use of books. An interesting ulternative to the use of the said "book"...so no, dont send them to Africa. Send a hoe, or a bottle of water...the books can stay.

Sabine

@ Ale; definitely, the people in Africa should stay inside to study hard on their German. Working on the land is bad for their skin anyway....

adry

I love this project because the idea itself it is so simple

Kaptain krunch

i half agree with Ale, I'm a complete bibliophile and the idea of deliberately letting books perish like this just makes me cringe and curl up on the inside. Like fingernails on a blackboard. Any other material than Books!!!

they would have been thrown away or burnt anyway. western culture has no respect for books and this is a great cultural statement against that. They are essentially just trees returning to nature anyway!

muddypath

hmmmm load of old books in a forest - fallen leaves?

ehk!

C J Lim proposed this years ago....

NzLA

haha awesome, quite provocative to see something (most) of us treat so carefully left out in the rain! Makes you think about the huge number of books we do waste - magazines especially as well as all the literature expelled from libraries once its a bit past it. Almost as cool as the compacted bricks squeezed from plastic which couldn't be recycled which is taking off down here in New Zealand at the moment. Yeah and how about thinking about something slightly more useful to 'send to Africa' if such transportation energy was to be expended.

Maria Lewis

Article contains fruitful information which will be liked by the readers.